Spotting innovation – new cut-e assessment has Google ‘inside’ to help identify those with creativity

Innovation is critical to the business success of many organisations. But knowing how creative and innovative someone is, can be hard to assess.

Leading online assessment provider, cut-e, is delighted to announce the release of its innovative online assessment – sparks – which measures and identifies those with creativity as part of initial recruitment or employee assessment.

Dr Achim Preuss, co-founder of cut-e Group comments, “Identifying those capable of innovation has been somewhat of the ‘holy grail’ in assessment – seemingly sought after but unattainable. Attempts in the past to measure innovation or creativity have resulted in tests being developed which either require strong drawing skills and so unfairly bias against those not so good at drawing, or need an unacceptable amount of time to score – or indeed may just not be measuring what is thought to be being measured. And yet, we know from our conversations with clients, an easy-to-use, quick and reliable test of innovation would form an essential part of a pre-selection range of tests. But it’s different now. With advances in technology – and having access to the capability of the Google websites – means that assessments of creativity can be more accurate and usable.”

The cut-e development team has been able to develop a valid assessment in which test takers are asked to create designs on-screen by combining different line drawings or objects presented to them. They are then asked to give a title to these created pictures. They are scored both on the number of pictures created and the validity of the titles given – and these are checked via a Google API.

Dr Preuss continues. “We’ve reviewed what it means to innovate and identified the key competencies for successful innovation processes – and we then worked out how best to harness artificial intelligent algorithms in combination with the Google website to deliver a reliable and valid online assessment in this area. Only a few years ago, the technology was not advanced enough to support the kind of test that we have created with sparks. We’ve not only tested out the items and their utility within a test, but ensured that the test is highly reliable and stands up to psychometric scrutiny.”

sparks is a short, 15 minutes online assessment which can be used as a standalone test or as part of cut-e’s Innovation Suite which includes scales lst – an abstract logical thinking test – and cut-e’s personality questionnaire – shapes.”